]]>London-based online currency transfer outfit TransferWise has raised a $58 million Series C round that was led by Andreessen Horowitz. This follows a $25 million Series B round just seven months ago, which included Virgin chief Richard Branson and original backer Peter Thiel (who are also in the current round, along with Index Ventures, IA Ventures and Seedcamp.) Like CurrencyFair over in Ireland, TransferWise uses cash reserves in various countries to bypass the banks and offer conversion rates that are far cheaper than those offered by traditional banks and remittance services. According to the Financial Times, Andreessen Horowitz won a competitive bidding process to invest in TransferWise, which is now valued at “close to $1 billion”.

]]>We’ve covered TransferWise quite a few times – along with one or two rivals such as CurrencyFair, the London-based financial technology startup offers a genuinely disruptive foreign exchange service that significantly undercuts the banks. Its backers apparently also continue to see great potential: having led TransferWise’s $6 million Series A round just over a year ago, PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures has again participated in the firm’s $25 million Series B, alongside Index Ventures, Virgin boss Richard Branson, IA Ventures, TAG, and Le Monde owner Xavier Niel. TransferWise, run by former Skype director Taavet Hinrikus, says it will use the funds for marketing.

]]>Mysterious mobile payments startup Clinkle has had no trouble attracting both cash and tech celebrities to its cause. Now it’s stocking up on experience as well. The Palo Alto ‘stealth’ company announced on Tuesday it has hired former Netflix CFO Barry McCarthy as its new COO.

McCarthy certainly brings industry expertise to the fledging company since many of the company’s employees – including its 22-year-old CEO Lucas Duplan – are being pulled directly out of Stanford University’s computer science department. McCarthy served as Netflix’s financial chief from 1999 to 2010, keeping the books during the video darling’s most rapid period of growth and its transformation into a streaming content giant as well as leading the Netflix’s IPO in 2002.

This time around McCarthy will be on board when his chosen company makes its first dollar. Clinkle hasn’t launched its first product yet. In fact, it’s given few details about what that product will actually be. We know Clinkle plans to enter the smartphone mobile payments space, challenging the likes of Google Wallet, Square Wallet and PayPal. We know Clinkle plans to start off focusing on college campuses. Everything else remains a mystery.

Whatever Clinkle has planned, McCarthy has swallowed the Kool-Aid, but he’s certainly not the only one. A dozen prominent investors, including Peter Thiel, Richard Branson and Andreessen Horowitz all lined up to back Duplan’s company, which raised an astonishing $25 million seed round. There’s something in Duplan’s PowerPoint pitch that’s causing both money and talent to jump on board. McCarthy was hardly modest in his own estimations of Clinkle’s potential.

“Clinkle is one of those rare Netflix-like opportunities, only bigger,” McCarthy said in a Clinkle statement. “Lucas has a grand vision for broad-scale disruption of a huge consumer market enabled by growth in mobile devices and brilliant software innovation. That’s why Clinkle has been funded by some of the smartest money in Silicon Valley and why I signed on to be Lucas’ partner.”

]]>Oyster, the Peter Thiel-backed startup that aims to be a Netflix for ebooks, was iPhone-only and invite-only for its first six weeks. On Wednesday, though, Oyster launched its iPad app and opened up to everyone. And it is now offering a free 30-day trial of its service — which is essential, since consumers are still very unfamiliar with ebook subscription services.

When I reviewed Oyster six weeks ago, I was impressed by its design and its offerings — over 100,000 in-copyright ebooks for $9.95 a month. But I thought the app’s lack of availability on iPad was a big drawback because I think it’s hard to do serious reading on an iPhone. The launch on iPad remedies this problem, of course, and subscribers’ books will sync between both devices.

Oyster’s design on iPad is great, just as the iPhone app design is. One feature I liked is that you can tap to turn pages on the iPad app — it’s a gesture that anyone who’s used a touchscreen e-reader should be familiar with, and it’s easier than swiping.

Oyster CEO Eric Stromberg and cofounder and chief product developer Willem Van Lancker wouldn’t tell me how many people have signed up for Oyster in its first six weeks. Van Lancker said the reaction has “exceeded all our expectations” and offered a semi-statistic: Ten days into launch, users had read 1 million pages; the second million pages were read in six days; and the third million were read in three days. Stromberg said that “in the initial push we saw a significant level of enthusiasm that translated to sign-ups” and that growth since then has been “very consistent.”

Oyster has also added some more content since launch. A few new publishers have joined — including “a couple small prestigious independents” — but the company wouldn’t name names. Stromberg said that many of the publishers who initially signed up with Oyster have added “lots of new titles” to the service since it launched, for example, “HarperCollins sent us a bunch more titles.”

Stromberg mentioned HarperCollins because, about a month ago, document-sharing site Scribd publicly launched its rival ebook subscription service, for $8.99 a month and with almost all of HarperCollins’ backlist (books over a year old). HarperCollins explained to me at the time that it chose to make more titles available to Scribd than to Oyster because Oyster is a startup, while Scribd, which was launched in 2007, already has about 80 million users and “the hardest thing is building audiences at scale.” Another bonus for HarperCollins was the fact that Scribd is available across platforms, including Android.

Scribd‘s ebook subscription service has been up and running quietly since January, and this week the company shared a few stats that provide some idea of how subscribers are using ebook services. Scribd’s “power user” reads about 10 books a month (though, according to information Scribd presented at the Frankfurt Book Fair, “power users” make up only about 2 percent of subscribers). For every book read completely, the company said, a user browsed an average of 4.5 other books. And check out the most popular devices for reading:

]]>London-based TransferWise is a pretty smart operation. Backed by PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel and led by former Skype director Taavet Hinrikus (pictured above), the financial technology firm allows users to bypass the banks’ largely unjustified fees for international money transfers.

On Tuesday, TransferWise gave an update on its progress: the service has now been used for the “peer-to-peer” transfer of over £250 million ($399 million) and its customers are transferring over £1 million ($1.6 million) each day on average.

It also outed its first proper mobile app, for iOS — yes, it already has an Android app but that’s little more than a shortcut to the TransferWise mobile website. According to Hinrikus, the Android app was an “old trial” that will be removed from the Google Play Store shortly; a proper Android app is under development now.

But wait, there’s more…

On top of that, TransferWise has now also added more currencies — the Indian Rupee, Australian Dollar, Singapore Dollar and Turkish Lira — and brought in the ability to send money internationally to an email address rather than requiring bank details (a bit like PayPal, actually). Also, you can now embed a TransferWise payment button on your website and…

Hang on. Is TransferWise morphing into PayPal?

“I wouldn’t quite agree,” Hinrikus told me Tuesday. “We’re doing things just to make it easier. It’s a complaint we’ve heard often from people — when sending money to a friend, they don’t have their bank details to hand. The payment button started from analyzing how our customers are using it.”

Uh-huh. Keep going…

“One typical use case we have is people who are providing services internationally — if they’re renting a villa in Greece to people in the U.K., for example.” So why use TransferWise rather than PayPal for that? “PayPal charges a hell of a lot for foreign exchange — between 3-4 percent, which I would call daylight robbery. TransferWise charges 0.5 percent,” Hinrikus said.

“PayPal is a payment method nowadays and we’re a million miles away from that. There’s a lot of work to do to help people move money internationally, and we can’t let ourselves be distracted by what other companies have done.”

OK, fair enough. But — particularly with Thiel being in the mix — it’s hard not to shake the idea that TransferWise is evolving into a PayPal rival.

After all, I’m pretty sure PayPal would still describe itself as a money transfer outfit as well as a payments firm and, certainly as far as a large segment of consumers and businesses is concerned, it’s a straight-up choice between the two.

]]>Mobile security outfits are a dime a dozen these days, but one particular San Francisco startup is garnering a lot of interest from both telecom and Valley heavyweights. Lookout on Thursday said it has secured a huge $55 million strategic financing round led by Deutsche Telekom with participation by Qualcomm Ventures, Peter Thiel’s Mithril Capital Management and Greylock Partners.

Later this year, Lookout plans to launch Lookout for Business, which will extend its consumer threat protection to enterprises. Mobile security in the enterprise will be one of the topics we discuss at GigaOM’s Mobilize conference next week, in particular how exposed our data and devices become as the smartphone becomes a remote control for the internet of things.

]]>The hype keeps building around Clinkle, a still-secretive Palo Alto mobile payments startup founded by 22-year-old Lucas Duplan. It’s already raised $25 million in seed funding from an impressive list of Silicon Valley backers, and that list just got even more impressive. Clinkle announced Virgin Group founder Sir Richard Branson has made a personal investment of an undisclosed amount in the company.

Despite the big spotlight, Clinkle hasn’t let on exactly what it plans to do. We know this: Clinkle is creating a mobile wallet that requires no special hardware on the phone (i.e. no NFC chip) nor at the point-of-sale – just software. Clinkle also plans on overcoming the problem of scale every mobile payments service faces by focusing on college and universities campuses, which tend to be insular environments.

That hardly sounds revolutionary, but Clinkle founder and CEO Duplan has hinted at some other technical element that is making people like Branson and Thiel go gaga at demos. TechCrunch and ValleyWag may have caught a whiff of that mystery technology from their sources. Both reported that Clinkle uses high-frequency sound to exchange information between phones and standard payment terminals, though TechCrunch later excised its post of the relevant graphs. It’s hard to say if these are anything more than rumors at this point.

In any case, investors aren’t the only ones getting excited about the wallet Clinkle plans to offer. Clinkle also announced today that it has a waiting list of 100,000 students at college campuses around the country signed up to download its mysterious app.

]]>Startup SustainX has turned on its first large air energy storage device, which stores energy like a battery does but in the form of compressed air in tanks. The company, which has raised funding from investors like GE, RockPort Capital, Polaris Venture Partners and the Department of Energy, said the device is the world’s first megawatt-scale (1.6 MW) isothermal compressed air energy storage hardware. Startup General Compression has also commissioned a 2 MW scale project using similar air storage technology.

While air energy storage tech is decades old, there’s a new generation of startups working on new innovations with this technology. SustainX had already built out a 40 kilowatt air energy storage project at its headquarters in West Lebanon, New Hampshire, and other startups like General Compression and LightSail are working on similar tech. But reaching the megawatt-scale — there are 1,000 kilowatts in 1 megawatt — is important because it shows that the technology is getting closer to reaching commercial scale.

The idea behind the new compressed air energy storage tech is that utilities and power companies will install the compressed air energy storage devices next to power generation plants –both fossil fuel-based power sources like coal and natural gas, and clean power farms like wind and solar. The compressed air energy storage tanks use excess energy to compress air and store it until energy needs to be delivered; to deliver the energy the tanks release the air, which runs turbines, and in turn creates electricity.

Compressed air energy storage could be particularly useful for clean power generation, because wind only generates electricity when the wind blows and solar only provides power when the sun shines. But paired with energy storage, solar and wind farms could provide energy when the wind stops blowing and the sun stops shining.

There are a variety of forms of utility-scale energy storage, from banks of lithium ion batteries, to large pumped hydro energy storage installations (pump water up a hill and let it flow back down), to wacky stuff like these gravel buckets on a ski lift. Each of the forms have different costs and benefits.

Compressed air energy storage is thought to be one of the more inexpensive forms of utility energy storage, particularly compared to tech like lithium ion batteries. The key to the air energy storage is to make the compression and release of the air as efficient as possible. Several of these startups are using a water spray in the air to manage the temperature of the compression and release. Other researchers are looking at ways to compress air into underground chambers instead of tanks.

Investors and venture capitalists have seemed interested in investing in innovation around compressed air energy storage. LightSail is backed by Khosla Ventures, Peter Thiel and Bill Gates. General Compression is funded by US Renewables Group, ConocoPhillips, Duke Energy, Serious Change, and the Wellford Energy Group.

SustainX expects that its first commercial units will be installed in China next year, according to IEEE Spectrum. LightSail and General Compression are working on similar time lines.

Updated on September 24 at 11:42AM PST to add in information about General Compression’s 2 MW project.

]]>A lot of startups want to be the Netflix (or Spotify, Pandora, whatever) for ebooks. That is, they want to provide unlimited access to ebooks for a flat monthly fee.

But this is really hard to pull off, because services like this need enough books to make the prospect of paying a flat fee for them palatable. Publishers are reluctant to sign up their titles, in part because of the difficulty of paying authors when their books are viewed this way. So you have services like Amazon’s Kindle Owners’ Lending Library, which contains over 400,000 titles — the vast majority of them self-published stuff that you have never heard of.

When I first heard about the New York-based startup Oyster last year, I was extremely skeptical. Backed by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and founded by former Hunch, Google and Microsoft employees, the company claimed last October that it would be the Netflix of ebooks. Then we didn’t hear much from it for nearly a year. I pretty much assumed the founders hadn’t been able to pull it off and I was not surprised.

I was wrong, though: On Thursday, Oyster launched on iPhone with over 100,000 in-copyright ebooks (i.e., not free public domain stuff) that users can access for $9.95 a month. It’s currently invite-only, and I’ve been testing the app for about a week now. The books are good: Real stuff you’ve heard of, from real publishers. The app’s design is fabulous: It looks and feels like a real app designed by a real tech company. Oyster isn’t perfect, but it actually delivers what it promises, and I recommend giving it a try.

First things first: How’s the content?

The app’s design is important, but if the content isn’t there, a service like this won’t work. So the key thing is that Oyster has the books: Over 100,000 in-print titles, plus public-domain titles that are not included in that 100,000 figure.

A warning: You will not find hot new bestsellers here. But you will find real books that you have heard of, published within the last decade, from publishers that you have heard of (if you follow that sort of thing). A sampling of the books available: Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen, Life of Pi by Yann Martel, The Best American Short Stories 2012, Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri, The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, In Sunlight and in Shadow by Mark Helprin, Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane, Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer, Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely, Just Kids by Patti Smith.

Publishers participating — i.e., making at least a few titles available, not their whole catalogs by any means — include HarperCollins, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Workman, Algonquin, Melville House, Rodale, Open Road, RosettaBooks, F+W Media and self-publishing distributor Smashwords. You’ll note that HarperCollins is the only big-five publisher on that list, though Oyster says it’s in negotiations with all the big guys. As for Smashwords, if you were wondering if Oyster is filled with self-published stuff you have never heard of, it isn’t: You can find a specific Smashwords title if you are looking for it, but Oyster will only feature select Smashwords titles on its home screen (as it only features select titles from other publishers).

Oyster wouldn’t get into details with me about how it’s compensating publishers and authors, and wouldn’t state whether newer, more well-known titles are getting better royalties than older ones. CEO Eric Stromberg told me, “We’ve had the benefit of other seeing other types of access models like this, seeing where they have done things the right way and where they tripped up, and structured our model in a way that is beneficial to content owners.”

Thank goodness for offline reading

If you want to watch a movie on Netflix while you’re on a plane, you’re screwed: You can’t download it for later. With Oyster, however, after you add a book to your reading list, you can access it offline. You only need an internet connection to download new titles. That’s awesome.

The app’s design is fabulous

The iPhone app is crisp, clean and intuitive to navigate. You can tell that it was designed by folks with a serious tech and mobile background: Cofounder and chief product officer Willem Van Lancker was a lead designer for the Google Maps iOS app. In my pre-launch tests, the app never crashed or froze up.

Oyster’s home screen offers Netflix-style browsing, with books’ covers arranged in rows in categories like “New & Noteworthy,” “Award-Winning Fiction,” “Book to Blockbusters” and “Popular Science.” To delve deeper, you can browse by genre (history, fiction and literature and so on) or search by title or author. When you see a book you want to read, you can either press a “play” button to start reading right away or press a little “+” icon to add it to your reading list.

When you start reading a book, you can adjust the type size and screen brightness or select one of five typographic “themes” that change the font, line spacing, colors and textures of the reading screen. “It makes it a little bit more human and less geeky,” Van Lancker told me. It’s a small, pleasing thing that’s just one example of the close attention to detail in the app’s design.

There are discoverability and social aspects, if you care about that

Just as I don’t usually care what my social network is watching on Netflix, knowing what my social network is reading is not a must-have for me in an app like this. Oyster does have social features: You can follow other users, see what they’re reading and recommend books to them. But the social features don’t overwhelm the app, and you can ignore them if you want to. That’s especially early on, when I don’t know anybody who has actually signed up to use Oyster yet.

Oyster does have a recommendation algorithm, but it’s not a big part of the app at launch. “As we gain insight into the preferences and activity of readers as well as the similarities among books, recommendations will become more highly personalized and will change over time,” Stromberg told me. To start, though, the company is relying on human editors to curate featured sets of books and titles.

Now for the not-so-good

Oyster’s largest limitation is platform: It is only available on iPhone at launch. Stromberg told me that he’s particularly bullish on mobile reading because people have their phones with them all the time, and that’s why the company went with iPhone first. In some ways, I can see the logic of this: Having Oyster on iPhone first makes it easy to dip into and out of books while you’re in transit, and the fact that you don’t need an internet connection to read them (once you’ve added them to your reading list) really does make it easy to dip in and out.

That said, part of me thought it would have made more sense for Oyster to launch on iPad first. I think that most people do most of their serious book-reading at home, and at home, reading on a phone probably isn’t your first choice. It means that right now you can’t really curl up with a book through the Oyster app.

Regardless, you won’t have to wait too long for iPad: That app is coming this fall.

Android users may simply be out of luck: Stromberg said Oyster currently has no “concrete plans” to launch on platforms beyond iOS.

]]>PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel is, to put it mildly, a prolific investor. These days it feels like his main focus is on cleantech, but he also still has an eye for the financial technology (fintech) sector, as evidenced by the investment his Valar Ventures vehicle has just made in Transferwise.

We’ve covered Transferwise several times over the past couple of year, documenting how the U.K.-based firm is shaking up the international bank transfer market. The company maintains reserves across multiple countries, which it uses to allow transfers at much cheaper rates than those levied by traditional banks.

One of Transferwise’s early angels was PayPal co-founder Max Levchin, so it’s not hugely surprising to see Thiel join in the company’s $6 million Series A round. Other participants include Levchin again, IA Ventures, Index Ventures, TAG, Seedcamp, former Betfair CEO David Yu and Xavier Niel’s Kima Ventures.

Transferwise does seem to be growing at a very healthy clip indeed. At the end of February 2012, it had done £10 million ($15 million) in transactions. By the end of 2012 the total was £50 million, and now it’s apparently £125 million – growth is between 20-30 percent a month. And it’s not hard to see why. I used the service myself once, and it does what it says on the tin: save money.

As Thiel said in a statement:

“Innovation in the banking industry typically involves rent-seeking or unsound derivatives, which offer marginal benefits to consumers. TransferWise demonstrates true innovation in banking by enabling its users to retain their wealth across borders.”

According to Transferwise co-founder Taavet Hinrikus, the fresh funding will help the firm add a dozen new currencies (it currently does euros, pounds, dollars, Polish zlotys and Danish, Swedish and Norwegian krone) and push into the German, Spanish, French and Italian markets.

The company will also hire about another 20 people, on top of its current 35, and will start “taking a look at traditional marketing” too, Hinrikus said.